Someone’s been reading SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/red-2

It actually turns out to be a lot easier just to make smaller spiders.

Oh, so it’s custom-made as a joke, not an off-the-shelf model that you just put the wrong bullets in. That makes more sense.

Thanks :)

Why the %^&* does that huge bullet even fit and work in that pistol? From the pic it’s obvious the 45-70 is so much wider than the 9mm

Any explanation for those of us who are not gun enthusiasts?

My guess: it’s a mouthful and not catchy. “Linux” is short, catchy and easy to pronounce. With “GNU/Linux” I don’t even know if I’m supposed to spell out the GNU or pronounce it as a word, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to say the “/” as “slash” or “plus” or “and” or if it should actually just be silent. I like to type how I speak, so if I don’t know how to say it I’m not going to write it, and I’m not going to like reading it.

I can totally see the merits for “GNU/Linux” but don’t underestimate the importance of catchiness. Maybe if it were shortened to “Ginux” it could stand a better chance, but then we’d have another gif situation.

Ah yes, the lollipop guild defence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_HBmZuJlHs

and Windows 10 is obviously so outdated it’s not even worth including

4th row 3rd icon

They should add it in C++26

That is a ridiculous and baseless accusation that just by chance happens to be true

It actually means di-aboly, as in having two abolies. An aboly is an organ exclusively found in beetles that regulates certain hormoes.

And it’s called ironclad because they are well known for manufacturing and wearing suits of armor.

Seconded! I also can’t wait to find out whether Chopper can save Vegapunk, but that’s probably a ways away still…

“There are ways” ≠ this is what happens by default when done by the average user

Without IP your favourite books, movies, TV shows, music and video games would not exist.

No point discussing this if neither of us is going to prove it one way or the other.

Bitmaps are actually a key part of what I was thinking about, so you agree with me there it seems. There’s also the issue of using the wrong paper size. .IIRC Windows usually defaults to Letter for printing even in places where A4 is the only common size and no one has heard of Letter, and most people don’t realise their prints are cropped/resized. This would still apply when printing to PDF.

They maintain a high quality but not lossless.

As a trivial example, if you use the wrong paper size (like Letter instead of A4) then it might crop parts of the page or add borders or resize everything. Again I’ll admit, in 99% of cases it doesn’t matter, but it might matter if, say, an embedded picture was meant to be exactly to scale.

You are arguing that Elsevier shouldn’t exist at all, or needs to be forcibly changed into something more fair and more free. I 100% agree with this.

But my point was in general, not about Elsevier but about all digital publications of any kind. This includes indie publications and indie games. If an indie developer makes a game, and it gets bought maybe 20 copies but pirated thousands of times, do you still say “fuck that” to figuring out which “customer” shared the game?

I agree with “fuck that” to huge publishers, and by all means pirate all their shit, but smaller guys need some way to safeguard themselves, and there’s no way to decide that small guys can use a certain tool and big guys cannot.

What

It can be used to spy on any decent scientist who will send papers his/hers/theirs institution has access to, but their friend doesn’t.

By “spy” I mean things like: know how many times I’ve read the PDF, when I’ve opened it, which parts of it I’ve read most, what program I used to open the PDF, how many copies of the PDF I’ve made, how many people I’ve emailed it to, etc. etc. etc.

This technique can do none of that. The only thing it can do is: if someone uploads the PDF to a mass sharing network, and an employee of the publisher downloads it from that mass sharing network and compares this metadata with the internal database, then they can see which of their users originally downloaded it and when they originally downloaded the PDF. It tells them nothing about how it got there. Maybe the original user shared it with 20 of their colleagues (a legitimate use of a downloaded PDF), and one of those colleagues uploaded that file to the mass sharing site without telling the original downloader. It doesn’t prove one way or the other. It’s an extremely small amount of information that’s only useful for catching systemic uploaders, e.g. a single user who has uploaded hundreds or thousands of PDFs that they downloaded from the publisher using the same account.

And a savvy user can always strip that metadata out.

As a reminder, …

All true, and fucked up, but it’s not related to what I was talking about. I was talking about the general use of this technique.